Soylent Pulp Sausages

... because Soylent Pulp is authors!

• Nobel Prize shock horror: China is organizing a boycott after the Peace Prize is awarded to a Chinese pro-democracy dissident.
• I've waited a couple of days to give them a chance to say the "a" word, but nobody is considering antitrust in the "proposed" Borders/Barnes & Noble merger. Nobody — it's not just the WSJ (which has never met a merger it thought violated antitrust principles). A preliminary HHI calculation for

  def(market) = new, fully returnable trade bookstores for face-to-face sales with less than 5% sales of nontrade books (e.g., textbooks) by unit, across the nation

  is about 2100 on unit sales, and about 2050 on revenues... and antitrust scrutiny (of various kinds) is supposed to be triggered when the HHI exceeds 1600.

• My colleague Victoria Strauss at the invaluable Writer Beware discusses Author Solutions' lies in its latest misleading "white paper" on publishing. At least, I suspect they're "lies" — meaning that Author Solutions' leaders know damned well that it's false and misleading — because the "false and misleading" part is pretty well undoubted.
• Jim Macdonald reveals the secret formula to becoming a commercially published author of a novel... and it has nothing to do with an MFA, with expensive workshops, or with battles with/for Art led by the undereducated; neither does it have anything to do with getting "noticed" through overpriced vanity presses and/or jumping to self-publication without submitting to commercial publishers. OK, it's one secret formula, with one too many unguided rewrites for my taste. But then, I'm not undereducated, so my battles with/for Art are a little bit different from those Bohemian artistes — the ones more interested in being Artists than in producing Art — and for many writers one more unguided rewrite than Mr Macdonald recommends would be a really good idea. And that definitely included you, Ghost of Mr Heinlein, because most of your later work — after you and your second wife starting believing your own press releases — is/was utter crap.
• Maybe laws and sausages aren't as alike as one might think. Of course, as the story notes, that's from the perspective of an artisan wurstmeister... not from The Jungle.